This appears to have resolved itself.
Closing as not reproducible. If this changes, post here and we can re-open it.
Ugh, my bad. After 4-5 hours I'd thought it had stopped. It hasn't. I'm on updated Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit, participating in the client beta and the steampipe beta for Half-Life and the other Goldsrc games.
I have the same issue. Even if steam starts up in offline mode it tells me that the game "Half Life" requires an update.
I think that the non-beta is getting 0 byte updates when there is a beta branch change.
What effect does this empty update have on you?
@alfred-valve None whatsoever but I have it too! :+1:
Not having any effect on me, either. Noticed 0 byte updates to a few of the other hl-based titles today, so I assume this is part of the way steampipe handles updates.
Forgot about this. I'd say this is close-able. After buying Garry's Mod and joining the dev branch it's obvious this occurs when something's updated by a developer without a public update.
I see this for Half-Life 2: Episode One since the switch to Steam Pipe.
Here's an excerpt from content_log.txt that shows how EP1 (and apparently HL2) are updated without anything new downloaded.
@koraktor , those logs are fine and expected, they are due to some shuffling of content between depots (to support the hl2 demo).
@alfred-valve Although the logs might be fine, I still think this is a minor bug, that should be fixed.
This happens to me for Half Life every single time I start Steam.
Here's a pastebin showing it happen, then I close steam and re-open it 5 minutes later and it happens again.
I opened steam a third time now, two minutes later, and got the same zero byte update again.
Nothing extracted yet.
I've seen this reported, but I'm unable to find any previous reports. As of the last few updates to Half-Life and the Steam client beta, I've been seeing fairly regular 0 byte updates to Half-Life. Game files have been verified. I did repartition this drive and restore from backup during the same time-frame. I've also been attempting to convince Killing Floor to render textures, resulting in my restarting the Steam client a number of times. Ubuntu 12.10 fully updated.